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Blake Bailey does not make it easy for the casual reader of his gargantuan John Cheever biography. But those who persevere will be rewarded with a compelling portrait of a complicated and tortured author, some of whose stories are among the best ever written. At the start, Bailey assumes a familiarity with Cheever's character — conflicted bisexual, abysmal alcoholic, loving but often cruel father, relentless prevaricator — that exceeds what all but the most knowledgeable readers will bring to the book. Thus, in a prologue and the early chapters on the history of Cheever's New England clan, Bailey jumps back and forth between the man's sins and triumphs, between...

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Blake Bailey does not make it easy for the casual reader of his gargantuan John Cheever biography. But those who persevere will be rewarded with a compelling portrait of a complicated and tortured author, some of whose stories are among the best ever...

Fall 2006 Tamerlan Tsarnaev enrolled as a part-time accounting student at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He took classes for only three semesters - fall 2006, spring 2007 and fall 2008. "He wasn't even close" to getting a degree,...

Tabloid City
A Novel
Pete Hamill
Little, Brown: 278 pp., $26.99
There's murder and mayhem in Pete Hamill's latest novel, "Tabloid City," but the real victim in his book is the print journalism that Hamill knows and loves so well. This...